Will Honor bring more honour to Chinese smartphones?

Autumn is often the season for big smartphone releases, and a rising star from China has attempted to make itself more known on a global stage with a recently launched campaign.  

Honor, a now indendent brand that was formerly a sub-brand of Huawei, is now the No. 3 brand on the mainland. And it has designs on becoming a bigger player in hte premium smartphone segment on a global basis. 

The campaign for the new Magic 3 series began with a teaser focused on an ambiguous circular shape resembling a UFO.

The global campaign then progressed to a two-minute video showcasing the phone's features.

The UFO shape turns out to represent that phone's unique lens arrrangement, and the campaign keys in on the device's computational photography and cinematic video features. The available colours also allude to photography and filmmaking by referring to the colours of the so-called 'golden hour'. 

Chinese mobile brands Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo all seem have benefitted from the difficulties Huawei has faced due to US restrictions. And Honor surpassed both Xiaomi and Apple to become the No. 3 smartphone producer domestically, behind Oppo and Vivo.

Honor appointed Havas China and Havas London as its global integrated communication agency at the end of 2020. The Magic 3 series represents the brand's first global launch since Huawei sold it off.